Solid Waste Management and Recycling

170 ANNE M. KARANJA, MOSES M. IKIARA, THEO C. DAVIES

amongst street pickers Others that withstand damage are scrap metal, bones, steel,
bottles. The diagram below represents the materials preferred by street and dump
pickers.

The recovery of paper at the dump on this graph is overstated due to the collection of
clean paper from offices and other institutions in the CBD by one of the groups of the
Mukuru Recycling Project.

The price of paper depends on its type and condition. Clean white paper fetches about
Ksh. 4 per kg while brown paper sells for Ksh. 2 per kg. Soiled, i.e. wet and/or muddy,
paper is often rejected or sold for a marginal price. Seasonally, ‘good’ paper is abun-
dantly available during the sunny dry season, as not too much damage is inflicted. The
prices of paper have declined over the last few years from Ksh. 8-12 per kg in the mid
and late 1980s, to the current Ksh. 2-4 per kg.

In our surveys, waste pickers associated the price declines to the fall in factory demand
in turn resulting from the outsourcing of certain raw material inputs. The local market
for waste paper according to the waste pickers has declined because of the importation
of waste paper by the LSREs. Many LSREs that previously consumed most of the
local waste paper gathered by waste pickers took to importing waste paper from neigh-

Figure 8.2. Materials preferences for street waste pickers and dump waste pickers

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paper

plastic

w/bottles

B/glass

Bones

steel

scrap iron

SWPs DWPs

material